Shots ring out in a staccato barrage, and innocent men and women are cut down and maimed. Minutes later — though it seems like hours — the echoes of gunfire recede. Screams and sirens fill the air in a surreal scene that shocked survivors have a hard time comprehending. The trauma will haunt them for years to come … and they are the lucky ones.
The dead leave behind sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, spouses and friends. The wounded bear scars both physical and psychological. Some will carry guilt as a weighted chain they do not deserve, simply for surviving when others did not. Families will be torn asunder. Many of those involved will never be whole again. Some will encounter death, and in it, find a new reason to live.
Thus it is after each and every violent assault carried out in America at the hands of madmen.
Wong, Sodini, and McLendon were bitter, angry men with failed lives who lashed out at the world for their mediocrity in a final act of anger and cowardice. The dozens of lives these men took this year cannot be recovered; the heartache they caused among those that must pick up the pieces of broken families cannot be erased.
Weeks ago another mass murder took place, as a Muslim major in the U.S. Army committed treason and jihad. Thirteen people died and 30 others were wounded after Nidal Hasan strode into the Soldier Readiness Center, shouted “Allahu Akbar!“ and began shooting. Several minutes later Hasan was shot down by responding police officers. He survived, is paralyzed, and faces military justice for his terrorist attack.
Now, some look to capitalize on the destruction and mayhem at Fort Hood.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Violence Policy Center, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Freedom States Alliance, Legal Community Against Violence, States United to Prevent Gun Violence, and more than two dozen other anti-gun organizations have decided to use the murder of American servicemen to advance their own perpetual cause: the undermining of the Second Amendment.
They used the occasion to draft a letter to our anti-gun president, seeking an immediate ban on the importation of the pistol Hasan used to carry out his jihad: an FN Herstal Five-seveN. They claimed — as they have for several years — that the pistol is a threat to pierce police body armor, and that armor-piercing ammunition for this firearm is readily available. They also used the occasion to refer to the pistol by the name given to it by Mexican drug cartels: “mata policia,” or “cop-killer.”
The irony that they were responsible for fabricating the Five-seveN’s reputation seems to have escaped them.
It is possible that, in Mexico, police officers have been killed by Five-seveN pistols using armor-piercing ammunition. After all, the Mexican government has access to both the Five-seveN and the FN P-90 carbine, and government weapons are “acquired” by the cartels with disturbing frequency thanks to endemic government corruption. With access to the weapons, it is possible that they also have access to the armor-piercing ammunition that FN will only sell to the military and law enforcement.
But the simple fact of the matter is that the Five-seveN pistol labeled a “cop-killer” by these anti-gun organizations has no record of actually killing a police officer in the United States. So far there is just one known shooting of a police officer with this weapon, and that occurred at Fort Hood. Kim Munley, one of two officers who engaged Hasan, was shot in each leg and her wrist, but was wonderfully alive and able to appear on Oprah a week later.
So if the Five-SeveN’s reputation is largely the result of hype from the very doomsayers that hope to see it banned, what is it that these anti-gun organizations hope to accomplish with this letter?
In a word, precedent.
If these organizations can convince President Obama to use his executive authority to ban the import of the Five-SeveN using the Fort Hood shooting as an excuse, they will then have that precedent to use for going after other foreign-manufactured firearms, one at a time. Logically, if they were able to convince the president to impose the importation ban on the Five-seveN, they could then progress to the FN PS-90 carbine, which uses the same 5.7 x 28mm ammunition as the Five-seveN — ammunition these organizations insist is readily available in “armor-piercing” versions.
And to a very limited extent, they are technically telling the truth.
The SS190 “armor-piercing” round banned in 1999 (years before the Five-seveN reached the civilian market) is now so rare that the cartridges are far too expensive to shoot. Also, they are only bought by collectors. To give you a sense of perspective, a 50-round box of premium Cor-Bon match-grade 9mm sells for $24.99. Aluminum-cased practice ammo for the 9mm runs almost half that price, at $13.29 a box.
A single, 50-round box of armor-piercing SS190 ammunition sold at auction on October 12 for $801, or $16 per cartridge.
To top off the absurd fear-mongering of the anti-gun groups, the armor-piercing claim was never meant to apply to the SS190 cartridge fired from the short 4.5″ barrel of the Five-SeveN pistol. To achieve armor-piercing velocity, the bullet has to be fired from the longer-barreled P90 submachine gun for which the cartridge was originally designed.
But as mentioned before, this isn’t really about one gun, or one cartridge.
As a director of the leftist Joyce Foundation, Barack Obama directed millions of dollars in grants to these very same anti-gun organizations. He even attempted to corrupt legal scholarship — thereby conning the Supreme Court — during his tenure. He merely needs a decent excuse to issue an executive order to ban this or any other specific firearm. Starting with the Five-seveN, and then the PS-90, it would be a quick transition to banning the import of the AK-type semi-auto rifles so popular among American shooters and any other foreign firearm that the administration declares to be “non-sporting.”
These anti-gun groups know they cannot hope for Congress to revisit the implementation of their favorite gun control laws, and so they pin their hopes on a president who is quite literally one of them.
Whether or not Obama thinks he can get away with implementing this piece-by-piece obliteration of the Second Amendment is a political calculation, which will be decided based on whether or not he thinks American patriots will take this challenge from his allies standing up or lying down.
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